Andrew Kirkrose’s poem “corium”, covered in Jack’s highlighting and closed comments. In light green, Jack highlighted: “I only dream in garden”, “open/ space”, “flowers/ are so bored”, “our blood/ was sweet”, and “quiet waters”. In purple: “until it was/ too late”, “never a year before/ shame, no stirring/ before blush”, “no notion of being cast away”. In pink: “lung bared on/ every side to climb, to/ borrow and trail”, “bone”, “the egg-layers came/ with unsparing teeth”, “drink/ their fill of quiet waters” In dark green: “yield”.

 

“corium”, by Andrew Kirkrose, was first published in A Given Grace.

 

 

 

When Lilith logs in, the pain of sliding the 10cm-long steel jack into the port behind his head is barely a memory. It’s easier than the first sting had been; dulled by years of packing saboteur programs into capsids… of finding cruising mouths, both terrified and awed. Years fuelling rogue co-ops’ doomed, dappled halls, before massaging the steaming trellises of hothouse companies’ server space.

 

But the beginning didn’t matter. By the time any robotanist had realized the implications of their work, they could only aid and abet.

 

He opens his eyes, flexing his beringed hands. Under his boots, the Company login page spreads and retracts above void. It beats to slow his distant body’s breathing – square to pentagon to hexagon to octagon… then back. He scowls. This scene’s mined from his Tumblr account.

 

The warmth around him and Eve, far from innocent, belies the Frontline Intruder Repulsion (Electronic) – FIR(E) – shielding the page’s code. He could attempt a hack, but the way it prickles his sinuses tells him the effort would fry his frontal lobe. Eve’s there too, massaging the back of her neck under her teal-dyed hair. “This takes me back,” Eve murmurs sweetly, “if not for the lack of nipples.”

 

Lilith rolls his eyes good-naturedly, taking his partner’s hand. As they walk, the spreading polyhedron fades into the best meadow Pinterest and Instagram feeds can build. Ixoras dot planter boxes of sakura and water-lilies; renaissance painter roses bob by HD, 3D photographs. Once Lilith and Eve find the gazeboed garden with its perfect SketchUp white tables, they are swarmed by smooth women; mostly white, blond, sundressesed, all cooing and grazing hands, touch lingering just a little too long… pointedly ignoring their company bios to address them by legal name and she/her pronouns. Bots to pad the audience, and to lull dissatisfied employees.

 

Between them Lilith glimpses colleagues like him and Eve, some wearing the same green stinkbug pin on lapels, sleeves, the odd sling-bag that might hide anything from NSFW afterparty skins to a virus’ buds. When Eve squeezes his hand and drifts after one of the stinkbugs, Lilith is briefly tempted into a nearby bot flock. But every touch reminds him of old fanfiction. Every breathy promise and hungry gaze seeks no pleasure; not Lilith’s hardening nipples and warming tdick in the real world, the trust fall of genuine sub/dom fun. It’s just slurry extrapolated from user history and IP address. Sex seared into statistic.

 

Lilith pulls away as one calls him “good girl”, finds Eve giggling in a circle of programs. The human intern shepherding the group barely keeps pace with Eve’s banter. The new programs are insect-delicate, epochs ahead of the plasticky bots roaming the audience. Packed with the nimblest machine-learning algorithms around, they seek fresh datasets and spare user RAM like mosquitoes do blood.

 

Lilith would know. He’d grown those algorithms himself.

 

Eve could say more about the hallucination-proofing, designed to stop them from accepting fictions; or the self-preservation routines controlling their flaming tongue-blades. Lilith could assemble an anatomy in employee explanations, but he wouldn’t have to; the programs are spinning a new member of themselves into being, layer by yolky layer.

 

The robotanists had been tasked with replacing themselves.

 

It’s nothing new. The intern (with her crucifix necklace, cottagecore clothes, and disapproving glance for Lilith) is the post-acquisition future the Company’s CEO and shareholders seed. Weeding away the miscreants with histories. But even tradwife interns would be outpaced, bot by bot.

 

When the fresh newgram steps forward, Lilith tests it with a handshake and the plausibly-deniable DDOS spike prepared in his ring. Its eyes flash with retaliatory corporate FIR(E). Lilith folds. The human mind, jacked into the ‘net, is liquid data; like any robotanist, Lilith had allowed newborn programs only sips from his brain. With a potential threat limned in its FIR(E)light, however, the newgram can drink him dry. Unfortunate for a bot to kill during a media cycle, but easy enough to cover up…

 

Lilith staggers through the white grid of wicker chairs, biting his burnt tongue, and retreats to the relative safety of his front-row seat with Eve as the CEO and his garden stage spawn. FIR(E) smokes about his black-suited avatar. His speech is iterated to a sheen by the newgrams that now stand, gowned and jeweled, about him – to celebrate Company’s stride; the industriousness of its retiring robotanists. Lilith watches the man jabber about program-driven cars and the Company’s satellites… and Lilith smiles.

 

The CEO trusts. He’d delegate his work to newgrams as if they were desperate flesh and blood, willing to do wetwork while he took the credit. But, Lilith thinks – fingering his lapel’s stinkbug pin – the man had never understood.

 

When the CEO talks Mars colonies, his glib speech alerts one of Eve’s fact-checking systems. Newgrams twitch with the friction: corporate fictions dent their hard-fact training datasets. With time, the contradictions would build like heat in a faulty fission reactor. If the largest threat to the Company’s server space kept risking it with lies, the newgrams would have to eliminate the threat to themselves and the Company. The Company, the CEO had stressed – in his termination letter draft that Lilith had leaked – was bigger than its employees.

 

A CEO is just another employee.

 

The Company would survive the CEO’s stroke. Hunt the newgrams’ gardeners, lobby to shut down brainjacked access to the ‘net… but that would take time.

 

(And as Eve had put it, the night they’d dreamed the plan, while Lilith lapped Eve’s delicious blood off her avatar’s thighs– and we are so good at using it, aren’t we?)

 

When the crowd rises, Lilith does too; but he doesn’t applaud. No stinkbug does. He imagines the polygons spreading and contracting, struggling to suppress the sobs tightening his chest. Clasps Eve’s hand until their pixels blur and mix. Not for the last time – but oh, how soon last could come – the two close their eyes in cyberspace and open them continents apart.

 

 

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